Kentucky native tree and Thomas Merton

Kentucky Native Tree - Eastern Red Cedar - Grayson County

The trunk of the Eastern red cedar looks like of bundle of stems.  Eastern red cedar was once the only wood used for pencils in the United States.  By the 1940s it was hard to find enough trees to supply the factories and production switched to the California incense cedar, Calocedrus decurrens.  The California incense cedar is a western tree.

Thomas Merton visited the Motherhouse at Loretto, Kentucky.  During his visit he remarked that the trees surrounding the Motherhouse were magnificent and should never be felled. Thomas Merton wrote frequently of the silence of the woods in his writings.  He also suggested that being present in the woods was helpful to prayer and to the spiritual experience. 

Merton wrote pointedly about damage to the natural world, "Much of the stupendous ecological damage that has been done in the last fifty years is completely irreversible.  Industry and the military, especially in America are firmly set on policies that make further damage inevitable."